Dissenting Views

Librarians are supposed to stand for intellectual freedom, diversity of opinion, and providing access to materials that represent all points of view. How can we do that when many of us are intolerant of dissenting views? Allowing our profession to be a bastion of orthodoxy of any kind defeats our purpose.

From “The Loneliness of a Conservative Librarian” by David Durant
The Chronicle of Higher Education, from the issue dated September 30, 2005


Anyone care to speculate how Mr. Durant’s point might apply to the church?

It seems to me that when the church, just like ALA( the American Library Association), endorses any political orthodoxy we are at risk of losing sight of our primary objectives, bringing Christ Jesus to a lost and dying world and living the Christ life in it. That doesn’t mean we should not bring our faith into the political arena just that we should expect our churches to help us do so rather than tell us what party we should support.

The Founding Fathers of our nation had observed the problems a State Religion caused for religion as much as for the state. They recognized how important it was for Americans to exercise their religion freely. In essence they freed the church to be the church. Rather than making one orthodoxy or the other a “test” for our faith, the men who set up our nation allowed faith to drive our politics. The church should be interested in political issues, take part in the political life of our country, and send its members into the political arena armed and supported by sound doctrine and prayer. But, when that participation becomes endorsement and how one votes is a test of how good a Christian one is, the church, as much as ALA, needs to stop being political and start being the organization it was intended to be.

Google and the Luddites?

Google is being sued for copyright infringement. Filed yesterday, the suit made the news today. The New York Times starts its article as follows, “Three authors filed suit against Google yesterday contending that the company's program to create searchable digital copies of the contents of several university libraries constituted "massive copyright infringement."’

Like it or not, the digital library is coming. Some of us will welcome it. Others, like authors and the publishing industry, will either resist it or move with caution toward digitization. We are all going to have to manage it. I think it is a good thing such cases are being tried because these issues must be resolved and the copyright law clarified. As with all changes in technology, the path will not be smooth.

Some two hundred years ago the timesaving inventions in the textile industry in Great Briton lead to smashing the efficient new looms and rioting in the streets. These Luddites lent their name to anyone who opposes technological change. Fear of loss of income, of the uncertain and unfamiliar, of social displacement all played into the violence of the weavers who feared industrialization. Not all of their fears were unfounded but their resistance could not stop the juggernaut of the power loom.

Fears of infringement of copyright and loss of sales on the part of authors and publishers won’t stop the digital revolution. Changes to accepted and cherished institutions like the book store and the library are inevitable. We can either attack entities like Google that are on the forefront of this movement or we can join the movement or we can wait and watch the trends awhile longer. What we can’t do, or do at our own risk, is ignore the issue and hope it goes away. It won’t.

The New Yorker on the Digital Edge

I was listening to Morning Edition on my local NPR station this morning and heard an interesting piece about the newly released, 8 DVD archive of The New Yorker magazine. The set contains all the issues from 1925 to February of 2005. The DVDs have over 4,000 individual magazines in their entirety. This treasure trove sells for only $100 per set, an amazing value for the money. For a closer look visit The New Yorker website.

At the end of the story, the reporter discussed the copyright problems faced in producing this set. Recent Supreme Court decisions allow the archival digitization of the entire magazine where articles appear in their original context under its collective work copyright. Individual articles would have to have permission from the author to be reproduced so collections of J.D. Salanger or John Updike pieces or even partial archives present major difficulties to publishers. By producing a cover to cover copy, not only the significant but the mundane is preserved. You will find the great writers and the cartoons The New Yorker is famous for and you will find the ads, some quite odd after 80 years, and out-of-date announcement magazines include.

Technological advancements over the past 10 years, since the National Geographic produced a similar archive, is also a part of the picture in making this set available to the public. While building on the past, the magazine had to “invent the wheel” in working out the details of the project. From finding two copies of each magazine in good condition to transporting the collection in a truck driven you their own staff to the company who digitized it in Kansas City, the story of the creation of the DVDs is interesting on its own. More publications will undoubtedly follow and The New Yorker will be the first of many.

An interesting sidelight was that The New Yorker maintains a card catalog dating back to 1925 that numbered some 1.2 million cards. It was considered too valuable to transport as there is only one copy of the catalog. The technicians came to the card catalog to digitize this resource. The librarian in charge is spending his time searching the digital product these days and the card catalog is “gathering dust.”

The success of this project must make us wonder what other venerable library fixtures may soon be gathering dust. This may well be a significant step toward the digital library college administrators long for and library staffs feel great ambivalence toward. I think there are four issues in this news release that bear further thought: the copyright implications, the involvement of the publisher in the release of this product, the technological advancements to allow such a massive project to be completed in a timely manner, and the low cost making it affordable to a wide range of consumers. I think we are still some way from a truly digital library but this, and other efforts to offer us an affordable product, are important steps toward that end.